I mentioned somewhere that I would at some point put up a little phone video of myself playing a little ditty. Well, it’s below the fold. It’s an exercise from my Mel Bay Modern Guitar Method Grade 1 book – “Home on the Range”. I should mention that I am using my Yamaha acoustic for this one because it’s Home on the Range. I’ll put it below the fold.

I started playing guitar again a few weeks ago. I mostly use the Yamaha acoustic that I bought 13 years ago, but my dad gave me his old Guild Starfire III because he wasn’t playing it anymore. He originally got it in the 60s and has played the hell out of it between teaching guitar and playing in several groups. It was being a little wonky when I tried using it, sometimes playing, sometimes not. I think I’m just going to take it to a shop that can service it (we have a licensed Guild dealer nearby).

This post on TPMd by Amanda Marcotte really opened my eyes about why conservatives made such a big deal about “traditional” marriage being destroyed but never really supported that conclusion with any kind of premise that made sense.

In reality, however, there was a subterranean argument that actually is logical and makes perfect sense. It was never just about man-woman marriages. The tradition that is disappearing is the belief that marriage is a duty, especially for women. As Douthat argues, Americans are rejecting “the old rules, its own hopes of joy and happiness to chase.”

Progressives had a wrong, or incomplete, definition of “traditional”. The complaints about birth control and whether women should have control over their own bodies are all part of the same belief — that women should be under the thumb of a man and the hell with happiness and free choice and personal liberty. That kind of marriage should die in a fire.

Reading Douthat, you do get a better idea of why conservatives see same-sex marriage as a threat to traditional marriage. It’s not because straight people won’t want to get married if gays are doing it, too. It’s because it redefines marriage as an institution of love instead of oppression.

“For those of us running for president, everyone’s being baited with this question as if somehow that has anything to do whatsoever with running for president, and my position is it most certainly does not,” Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor and Baptist preacher, told NBC News on Sunday.

I have to wonder, though, if the racism symbolized by flying the flag of the traitors and armed insurrectionists who were in favor of keeping fellow human beings as property might be worthy of some sort of comment from someone who claims to have the correct morals to be president.

“If the state government of South Carolina wishes to address an issue in their state, that’s fine,” Huckabee continued Sunday. “If you can point me to an article and section in the Constitution in which a United States president ought to weigh in on what states use as symbols, then please refresh my memory on that.”

How about the Preamble, where we made the Constitution in order to promote the general welfare? Or Provide for the common defense? Or maybe, right there in the beginning, where we are hoping to form a more perfect union? Is it really a more perfect union when a state government endorses a symbol that says, “We wish you were all still slaves” to a large part of its constituency? How does that promote the general welfare of the people?

I’m guessing you have no problem condemning the swastika as a symbol of anyone not blonde-haired and blue-eyed being less than human. Why can’t you say the same thing for the symbol of southern racism?